How did Joseph Stalin die | History of Russia How did Joseph Stalin die Soviet Russia | 0 | When you consider the controversial life of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, it’s perhaps no surprise that his death itself is shrouded in myth and mystery. Was Stalin murdered, or did he die of natural causes? There is evidence to suggest both and while historians lean towards the explanation that foul play was involved and that Stalin was killed, we may never really know for sure. What do we know about Stalin’s death? While cold hard facts may be a little scarce, we do know that Stalin died on the 5th of March 1953 after a few agonising days spent on his deathbed. He was believed to have suffered a stroke on the 1st of March before finally succumbing to a brain haemorrhage five days later. In the United Kingdom, the BBC reported on the 5th of March that Stalin was close to death and then the news of his demise was confirmed the very next day. Russian History - Books we Recommend 1. As the dictator had suffered from ill health for several years, the whole scenario seemed completely plausible but the alternative theories were quick to materialise and slow to go away. Was Stalin Poisoned?

Back in 1953, it would have been much easier to carry out a poisoning and get away with it. Forensic methods were much less advanced and in the case of Stalin, there was no shortage of willing accomplices to help in a cover up and the dictator’s ill health gave a perfect explanation for his death. One of the strongest assassination theories involves the use of rat poison in a possible murder scenario. New Evidence? In 2003, a book was published entitled ‘Stalin’s last crime’ and inside, it makes reference to secret doctors’ reports, never before made public that suggested he was poisoned with the blood thinner and rat killer warfarin. At the time, there were fears that the Soviet Union was on the brink of war with the United States and inside the Kremlin, Stalin’s officials were starting to believe that their leader was taking them headlong into a catastrophic conflict. This was only eight years after the country’s heavy losses in World War II and the book infers that Stalin had to be stopped at any cost. The fateful night In a final dinner, Stalin found himself in the company of four members of his Politburo and it was here that the alleged act of poisoning took place.

The medical report indicated that there was extensive stomach bleeding which would have been consistent with an overdose of warfarin and this forms part of the basis of the book’s claims. Delayed Treatment Stalin’s guards were slow to react to his initial stroke and to add to the problems, some of the best doctors in the country were imprisoned due to one of the dictators own purges. The delays would have inevitably contributed to his death although it is doubtful as to whether swift action would have saved him. What is certain however is that the delayed treatment merely added to the myth and controversy surrounding the mysterious death of Joseph Stalin. Share: Joseph Stalin - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com Google Joseph Stalin’s Early Years and Family Joseph Stalin was born Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili on December 18, 1878, or December 6, 1878, according to the Old Style Julian calendar (although he later invented a new birth date for himself: December 21, 1879), in the small town of Gori, Georgia , then part of the Russian empire. When he was in his 30s, he took the name Stalin, from the Russian for “man of steel.” Did You Know?

In 1925, the Russian city of Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad. In 1961, as part of the de-Stalinization process, the city, located along Europe's longest river, the Volga, became known as Volgograd. Today, it is one of Russia's largest cities and a key industrial center. Stalin grew up poor and an only child. His father was a shoemaker and alcoholic who beat his son, and his mother was a laundress. As a boy, Stalin contracted smallpox, which left him with lifelong facial scars. As a teen, he earned a scholarship to attend a seminary in the nearby city of Tblisi and study for the priesthood in the Georgian Orthodox Church. While there he began secretly reading the work of German social philosopher and “Communist Manifesto” author Karl Marx , becoming interested in the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy. In 1899, Stalin was expelled from the seminary for missing exams, although he claimed it was for Marxist propaganda. After leaving school, Stalin became an underground political agitator, taking part in labor demonstrations and strikes.

He adopted the name Koba, after a fictional Georgian outlaw-hero, and joined the more militant wing of the Marxist Social Democratic movement, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin . Stalin also became involved in various criminal activities, including bank heists, the proceeds from which were used to help fund the Bolshevik Party. He was arrested multiple times between 1902 and 1913, and subjected to imprisonment and exile in Siberia. In 1906, Stalin married Ekaterina “Kato” Svanidze (1885-1907), a seamstress. The couple had one son, Yakov (1907-1943), who died as a prisoner in Germany during World War II . Ekaterina perished from typhus when her son was an infant. In 1918 (some sources cite 1919), Stalin married his second wife, Nadezhda “Nadya” Alliluyeva (1901-1932), the daughter of a Russian revolutionary. They had two children, a boy and a girl. Nadezhda committed suicide in her early 30s.

Stalin also fathered several children out of wedlock. Joseph Stalin’s Rise to Power In 1912, Lenin, then in exile in Switzerland, appointed Joseph Stalin to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. Three years later, in November 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. The Soviet Union was founded in 1922, with Lenin as its first leader. During these years, Stalin had continued to move up the party ladder, and in 1922 he became secretary general of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a role that enabled him to appoint his allies to government jobs and grow a base of political support. After Lenin died in 1924, Stalin eventually outmaneuvered his rivals and won the power struggle for control of the Communist Party. By the late 1920s, he had become dictator of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union Under Joseph Stalin Starting in the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin launched a series of five-year plans intended to transform the Soviet Union from a peasant society into an industrial superpower.

His development plan was centered on government control of the economy and included the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, in which the government took control of farms. Millions of farmers refused to cooperate with Stalin’s orders and were shot or exiled as punishment. The forced collectivization also led to widespread famine across the Soviet Union that killed millions. Stalin ruled by terror and with a totalitarian grip in order to eliminate anyone who might oppose him. He expanded the powers of the secret police, encouraged citizens to spy on one another and had millions of people killed or sent to the Gulag system of forced labor camps. During the second half of the 1930s, Stalin instituted the Great Purge, a series of campaigns designed to rid the Communist Party, the military and other parts of Soviet society from those he considered a threat. Additionally, Stalin built a cult of personality around himself in the Soviet Union. Cities were renamed in his honor. Soviet history books were rewritten to give him a more prominent role in the revolution and mythologize other aspects of his life. He was the subject of flattering artwork, literature and music, and his name became part of the Soviet national anthem. His government also controlled the Soviet media.

Joseph Stalin and World War II In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Joseph Stalin and German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) signed a nonaggression pact. Stalin then proceeded to annex parts of Poland and Romania, as well as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. He also launched an invasion of Finland. Then, in June 1941, Germany broke the Nazi-Soviet pact and invaded the USSR, making significant early inroads. (Stalin had ignored warnings from the Americans and the British, as well as his own intelligence agents, about a potential invasion, and the Soviets were not prepared for war.) As German troops approached the Soviet capital of Moscow, Stalin remained there and directed a scorched earth defensive policy, destroying any supplies or infrastructure that might benefit the enemy. The tide turned for the Soviets with the Battle of Stalingrad , from August 1942 to February 1943, during which the Red Army defeated the Germans and eventually drove them from Russia. As the war progressed, Stalin participated in the major Allied conferences, including those in Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945).

His iron will and deft political skills enabled him to play the loyal ally while never abandoning his vision of an expanded postwar Soviet empire. Joseph Stalin’s Later Years Joseph Stalin did not mellow with age: He prosecuted a reign of terror, purges, executions, exiles to labor camps and persecution in the postwar USSR, suppressing all dissent and anything that smacked of foreign–especially Western–influence. He established communist governments throughout Eastern Europe, and in 1949 led the Soviets into the nuclear age by exploding an atomic bomb. In 1950, he gave North Korea’s communist leader Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) permission to invade United States-supported South Korea, an event that triggered the Korean War . Stalin, who grew increasingly paranoid in his later years, died on March 5, 1953, at age 74, after suffering a stroke.

His body was embalmed and preserved in Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square until 1961, when it was removed and buried near the Kremlin walls as part of the de-Stalinization process initiated by Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971). By some estimates, he was responsible for the deaths of 20 million people during his brutal rule. Tags BBC NEWS | Europe | The mystery of Stalin's death The mystery of Stalin's death By Leonida Krushelnycky Millions came to say farewell to Stalin Fifty years ago, on 5 March 1953, the Soviet leader Josef Stalin died. His political life as a dictator who dominated millions has been minutely dissected over the decades. But his last days continue to provoke speculation and argument. Did he die of natural causes following a brain haemorrhage or was Stalin killed because he was about to plunge the Soviet Union into a war its people were in no position to fight?

Unusual order The night of 28 February began in the usual manner for Stalin and his closest political circle, Lavrenty Beria, Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin and Georgi Malenkov. We were glad when we got this order, and went off to bed without thinking twice Pyotr Lozgachev guard on duty They watched a film in the Kremlin then retired to Stalin's country home, 10 minutes outside Moscow, for yet another night of feasting. By the early hours of 1 March, Stalin's guests had gone back to their homes in Moscow. What happened next was out of the ordinary for a man as obsessed with security as Stalin. He gave an order for his guards to retire for the night - he was not to be disturbed. This change to Stalin's normal behaviour intrigued Russian historian Edvard Radzinski, and a few years ago he tracked down one of the guards on duty that night, Pyotr Lozgachev. Guards worried It was Lozgachev's testimony of that night that led Radzinski to speculate about what might really have happened.

The guards slept late the following morning, and so, it seemed, did Stalin - 12 o'clock, one, two o'clock came and no Stalin The guard confirmed that it was not Stalin who gave the guards the order to go to bed, rather the order was conveyed by the main guard Khrustalev. "Stalin would taunt the guards by saying 'Want to go to bed?' and stare into our eyes," Lozgachev said. "As if we'd dare! So of course we were glad when we got this order, and went off to bed without thinking twice." The guards slept late the following morning, and so, it seemed, did Stalin. Twelve o'clock, one, two o'clock came and no Stalin. The guards began to get worried, but no one dared to go into his rooms. They had no right to disturb Stalin unless invited into his presence personally. At 6.30 a light came on in Stalin's rooms, and the guards relaxed a little. But by the time 10 o'clock had chimed they were petrified. Lozgachev was finally sent in to check on Stalin.

"I hurried up to him and said 'Comrade Stalin, what's wrong?' He'd, you know, wet himself while he was lying there. He made some incoherent noise, like "Dz dz". His pocketwatch and copy of Pravda were lying on the floor. The watch showed 6.30. That's when it must have happened to him." 'World War III' The guards rushed to call Stalin's drinking companions, the Politburo. It was their tardiness in responding and calling for medical help that put questions of doubt in Radzinski's mind. Beria may have been behind Stalin's death Did they already know too much and so did not need to hurry to the "old man's" side? Mr Radzinski says Yes. He asserts that Stalin was injected with poison by the guard Khrustalev, under the orders of his master, KGB chief Lavrenty Beria. And what was the reason Stalin was killed? "All the people who surrounded Stalin understood that Stalin wanted war - the future World War III - and he decided to prepare the country for this war," Mr Radzinski says. "He said: we have the opportunity to create a communist Europe but we have to hurry.

But Beria, Khrushchev, Malenkov and every normal person understood it was terrible to begin a war against America because the country [Russia] had no economy. "It wasn't a poor but a super-poor country which was destroyed by the German invasion, a country which had no resources but only nuclear weapons. Those close to Stalin thought he wanted war "It was the reason for his anti-Semitic campaign, it was a provocation. He wanted an answer from America. And Beria knew Stalin had planned on 5 March to begin the deportation of Jewish people from Moscow." As always in Russia, conspiracy piles on conspiracy. Some saw buses parked all round Moscow to take away the Jews. Others glimpsed special barns erected for the deportees in Kazakhstan. But while the drama unfolded over the next few days in Stalin's country house, the citizens of the Soviet Union were split in their reaction to the imminent death of their leader. Many openly wept for the man they called '"Father", "Teacher", "God". Others in prison camps across the land allowed themselves to exchange secret smiles and hope that things would be different now. At 9.50pm on 5 March Stalin died.

By the next day his body was lying in state in the Hall of Columns, a few streets from Red Square. It is estimated that several millions came to see him one final time. Several hundred were rumoured to have died in the crush. Fifty years on, the rumours of intrigues and conspiracies continue. For a tyrant like Josef Stalin, a simple death would be just too mundane. The documentary The Last Mystery of Stalin - BBC Radio 4 on Monday, 24 February, 2000 GMT - charts the politics and emotions of a turbulent and truly significant week in Soviet history, through personal recollections and dramatic re-creations. Presenter: Tim Whewell Death of Joseph Stalin | History Today Death of Joseph Stalin The Soviet leader died on March 5th, 1953. Propaganda portrait of "Marshal Stalin", fromt the Second World War Just how many millions of deaths Joseph Stalin was responsible for is disputed, but that the figure runs into millions is not in doubt. To the end, when he was in his seventies and approaching his own death, his subordinates continued to carry out his murderous orders.

Stalin was paranoid in any case and in his later years he suffered from arterio-sclerosis. There’s a theory that this may have exacerbated his temper, which became ever more savage as he grew older. His doctor, Vladimir Vinogradov, noticed a marked change for the worse in Stalin’s health early in 1952. When he suggested that the dictator start to take things more easily, the patient flew into a furious rage and had him arrested. Several other medical men were arrested in 1952. Some of them were Jewish and newspaper tirades against ‘murderers in white gowns’ provoked widespread rumours about a medical conspiracy. There were whispers of babies killed in maternity wards and patients being given poisoned medicines. In January 1953 the Tass press agency reported the arrest of nine members of ‘a criminal group of killer doctors’, accused of murdering prominent Soviet figures. Six of the nine were Jews. More doctors were arrested and although many of them were not Jewish, there was an outbreak of anti-Semitism and Jews were attacked in the streets. Stalin meantime was seriously considering a plan to deport all Soviet Jews to Siberia. The accused doctors’ lives were saved by Stalin’s own death.

He had begun to feel his age and tell his subordinates that he had not long left to live. His senior colleagues, their homes and offices bugged by the security police, were all terrified of him. At a meeting of the Central Committee of the Party in October 1952 Stalin announced that he was too old to cope any longer and asked to be relieved of his post as Secretary General. Georgi Malenkov, in the chair, paled for fear that the other members would not instantly stand up to protest and demand that the request be denied. Fortunately for him, they did. Stalin left the Kremlin for his dacha at Kuntsevo, outside Moscow, in mid-February 1953, for the last time. There are conflicting reports of what happened, but after a routine night of heavy drinking until the early hours of March 1st, the guards became alarmed when there was no sound from their master all day and late in the evening a guard or a maid ventured in and found him lying on the floor of his bedroom. One account says he was conscious, but only able to make incoherent noises, and had wet himself.

Nikita Khrushchev recalled that he and Malenkov, Beria and Bulganin went out to Kuntsevo after a telephone call from the guards to Malenkov. At the dacha they were told that Stalin had been put on a sofa in the small dining room ‘in an unpresentable state’ and was now asleep. The four men, embarrassed and not realising that anything was seriously wrong, went back to Moscow. Not until the next day, with Stalin paralysed and speechless, were doctors summoned. Almost too frightened to touch him, they announced that he had suffered a massive stroke. Leading Politburo members went to the dacha every day, hesitating and dithering, apparently unsure what to do, while rumours spread that they or some of them had taken a hand in putting an end to the dictator. According to his daughter Svetlana, who was at the bedside, at 9.50pm on the 5th Stalin’s eyes opened with ‘a terrible look – either mad or angry and full of the fear of death’. He raised his left hand, pointing upwards, perhaps threateningly, and then death took him.

It was announced on the radio the next day, with appeals for calm, and the funeral was held in Red Square on March 9th in the presence of a huge crowd – so large that some were crushed to death. Stalin’s veteran colleague Vyacheslav Molotov, whose wife was in a prison camp where she was known as Object Number Twelve, spoke in praise of the dead tyrant. So did Malenkov and Beria, but in private Beria made no secret of his relief at the dictator’s passing. Stalin’s body was embalmed and was presently put on display with Lenin’s corpse in the renamed Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum. Malenkov, Molotov and Beria had taken steps to secure their own positions. At a meeting on March 6th Malenkov was appointed Chairman of the Council of Ministers. Molotov was to be foreign minister. Beria, appointed minister of internal affairs, organised an exhibition for members of the Central Committee at which tapes of Stalin’s conversations with security police were played and the late dictator’s responsibility for the arrest of innocent officials was clearly established. Nothing was said in public as yet, but the demolition of Stalin’s image had begun.

Related articles Joseph Stalin dies - Mar 05, 1953 - HISTORY.com Joseph Stalin dies A+E Networks On this day, Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union since 1924, dies in Moscow. Like his right-wing counterpart, Hitler, who was born in Austria, Joseph Stalin was not a native of the country he ruled with an iron fist. Isoeb Dzhugashvili was born in 1889 in Georgia, then part of the old Russian empire. The son of a drunk who beat him mercilessly and a pious washerwoman mother, Stalin learned Russian, which he spoke with a heavy accent all his life, in an Orthodox Church-run school. While studying to be a priest at Tiflis Theological Seminary, he began secretly reading Karl Marx and other left-wing revolutionary thinkers. The “official” communist story is that he was expelled from the seminary for this intellectual rebellion; in reality, it may have been because of poor health. In 1900, Stalin became active in revolutionary political activism, taking part in labor demonstrations and strikes.

Stalin joined the more militant wing of the Marxist Social Democratic movement, the Bolsheviks, and became a student of its leader, Vladimir Ilich Lenin. Stalin was arrested seven times between 1902 and 1913, and subjected to prison and exile. Stalin’s first big break came in 1912, when Lenin, in exile in Switzerland, named him to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party—now a separate entity from the Social Democrats. The following year, Stalin (finally dropping Dzugashvili and taking the new name Stalin, from the Russian word for “steel”) published a signal article on the role of Marxism in the destiny of Russia. In 1917, escaping from an exile in Siberia, he linked up with Lenin and his coup against the middle-class democratic government that had supplanted the czar’s rule. Stalin continued to move up the party ladder, from commissar for nationalities to secretary general of the Central Committee—a role that would provide the center of his dictatorial takeover and control of the party and the new USSR.

In fact, upon Lenin’s death in 1924, Stalin began the consolidation of his power base, conducting show trials to purge enemies and rivals, even having Leon Trotsky assassinated during his exile in Mexico. Stalin also abandoned Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which would have meant some decentralization of industry. Stalin demanded—and got—absolute state control of the economy, as well as greater swaths of Soviet life, until his totalitarian grip on the new Russian empire was absolute. The outbreak of World War II saw Stalin attempt an alliance with Adolf Hitler for purely self-interested reasons, and despite the political fallout of a communist signing an alliance with a fascist, they signed a nonaggression pact that allowed each dictator free reign in their respective spheres of influence. Stalin then proceeded to annex parts of Poland, Romania, and Finland, and occupy Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In May 1941, he made himself chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars; he was now the official head of the government and no longer merely head of the party. One month later, Germany invaded the USSR, making significant early inroads.

As German troops approached, Stalin remained in the capital, directing a scorched-earth defensive policy and exercising personal control over the strategies of the Red Army. As the war progressed, Stalin sat in on the major Allied conferences, including those in Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945). His iron will and deft political skills enabled him to play the loyal ally while never abandoning his vision of an expanded postwar Soviet Empire. In fact, after Germany’s surrender in April 1945, Stalin oversaw the continued occupation and domination of much of Eastern Europe, despite “promises” of free elections in those countries. Stalin did not mellow with age; he prosecuted a reign of terror, purges, executions, exiles to the Gulag Archipelago (a system of forced-labor camps in the frozen north), and persecution in the postwar USSR, suppressing all dissent and anything that smacked of foreign, especially Western European, influence. To the great relief of many, he died of a massive heart attack on March 5, 1953.

He is remembered to this day as the man who helped save his nation from Nazi domination—and as the mass murderer of the century, having overseen the deaths of between 8 million and 10 million of his own people. Related Videos Stalin's Death: He did not Escape the Consequences of his Actions Stalin's Death: He did not Escape the Consequences of his Actions Historical Myths By Robert Wilde Updated April 08, 2016. Did Stalin , the Russian dictator whose actions killed millions of people in the aftermath of the Russian Revolutions , die peacefully in his bed and escape the consequences of his mass slaughter? Well, no. The Truth: Stalin suffered a major stroke on March 1st 1953 but treatment was delayed from reaching him as a direct result of his actions over the previous decades. He slowly died over the course of the next few days, apparently in agony, finally expiring on March 5th of a brain haemorrhage. He was in bed. Is it a Myth?

The myth of Stalin’s death is often given by people wishing to point out how Stalin seemed to escape all legal and moral punishment for his many crimes: where fellow dictator Mussolini was shot by partisans and Hitler was forced to kill himself, Stalin lived out his natural life. There’s little doubt that Stalin’s rule – his forced industrialisation, his famine causing collectivisation, his paranoid purges – killed, according to many estimates, between ten and twenty million people, and he did most probably die of natural causes (see below), so the basic point still stands, but it isn’t strictly true to say he died peacefully, or that his death was unaffected by the brutality of his policies. continue reading below our video What are the Seven Wonders of the World Stalin Collapses: Stalin had suffered a series of minor strokes before 1953 and was generally in declining health. On the night of February 28th he watched a film at the Kremlin, then returned to his dacha , where he met with several prominent subordinates including Beria, head of the NKVD (secret police) and Khrushchev, who would eventually succeed Stalin.

They left at 4:00 am, with no suggestion that Stalin was in poor health. Stalin then went to bed, but only after saying the guards could go off duty and that they weren’t to wake him. Stalin would usually alert his guards before 10:00 am and ask for tea, but no communication came. The guards grew worried, but were forbidden from waking Stalin and could only wait: there was no one in the Dacha who could counter Stalin’s orders. A light came on in the room around 18:30, but still no call. The guards were terrified of upsetting him, for fear they too would be sent to the gulags and possible death. Eventually, plucking up the courage to go in and using the arrived post as an excuse, a guard entered the room at 22:00 and found Stalin lying on the floor in a pool of urine. He was helpless and unable to speak, and his broken watch showed he had fallen at 18:30.

A Delay in Treatment: The guards felt they didn’t have the right authority to call for a doctor – indeed many of Stalin’s doctors were the target of a new purge – so instead they called the Minister of State Security. He also felt he didn’t have the right powers and called Beria. Exactly what happened next is still not fully understood, but Beria and other leading Russians delayed acting, possibly because they wanted Stalin to die and not include them in the forthcoming purge, possibly because they were scared of seeming to infringe on Stalin’s powers should he recover. They only called for doctors sometime between 7:00 and 10:00 the next day after first traveling to the Dacha themselves. The doctors, when they finally arrived, found Stalin partially paralysed, breathing with difficulty and vomiting blood. They feared the worst but were unsure. The best doctors in Russia, those which had been treating Stalin, had recently been arrested as part of the forthcoming purge and were in prison. Representatives of the doctors who were free and had seen Stalin went to the prisons to ask for the old doctors’ opinions, who confirmed the initial, negative, diagnoses.

Stalin struggled on for several days, eventually dying at 21:50 on March 5th. His daughter said about the event: “The death agony was terrible. He literally choked to death as we watched.” (Conquest, Stalin: Breaker of Nations, p. 312) Was Stalin Murdered?: It is unclear whether Stalin would have been saved if medical help had arrived shortly after his stroke, partly because the autopsy report has never been found (although it is believed he suffered a brain haemorrhage which spread). This missing report, and the actions of Beria during Stalin’s fatal illness, have led some to raise the possibility that Stalin was deliberately killed by those afraid he was about to purge them (indeed, there is a report saying Beria claimed responsibility for the death). There is no concrete evidence for this theory, but enough plausibility for historians to mention it in their texts. Either way, help was stopped from coming as a result of Stalin's reign of terror, whether through fear or conspiracy, and this might well have cost him his life. The Death of Stalin (April 2003) - Library of Congress Information Bulletin Portrait of a young Stalin; the rising Communist with Vladimir Lenin, ca.

1922; Joseph Stalin Participants engaged in a lively discussion of Eisenhower's actions in the days and months after Stalin's death, the cause of Stalin's death (was it murder?), the impact of his death on the Soviet Union, and the future need to study and decry Stalin's slaughter of 25 million Soviets. About 100 people attended the March 5 event in Room LJ 119 of the Jefferson Building. This was one of several programs hosted by the Kluge Center, which brings distinguished scholars from around the world to the Library for varying periods of time to pursue their research in the Library's vast collections. The panel included eight "historical witnesses," who were involved in the events of the 1950s or close to those who were involved. Retired Army Gen. Andrew Goodpaster, Abbott Washburn and Robert Bowie served as advisers to Eisenhower. Sergei Khrushchev, professor at Brown University, is the son of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Susan Eisenhower, president of the Eisenhower Institute, is the granddaughter of the president, and Avis T. Bohlen, herself a former ambassador to Bulgaria, is the daughter of Charles Bohlen, U.S.

ambassador to the Soviet Union (1953-57). Raymond Garthoff worked at the CIA and Helmut Sonnenfeldt in the State Department. The panel's five historians were Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, a noted Russia scholar himself; Hope Harrison, George Washington University; Mark Kramer, Harvard University; Kenneth Osgood, Florida Atlantic University, and Vojtech Mastny, of the Woodrow Wilson Center. Left: Klaus Larres chaired a discussion on Stalin's death that included, from left, first row: Andrew Goodpaster, Abbott Washburn, Robert Bowie, Sergei Khrushchev; second row: Susan Eisenhower, Avis Bohlen, Raymond Garthoff, Hope Harrison; right: Kenneth Osgood and Vojtech Mastny. - Yusef El-Amin When Stalin died in March 1953, Eisenhower had been in office for only two months. Andrew Goodpaster said Eisenhower asked his advisers to evaluate three lines of policy toward the Soviet Union: containment, massive retaliation, and "roll back," which was the use of force to recover the countries of Eastern Europe from Soviet domination.

Goodpaster said Eisenhower settled on containment, "supplemented by a vigorous information program that would keep the hope of freedom alive." Goodpaster said Eisenhower's policy was one of "strength and civility," and his approach was to remain militarily strong but civil. "You would never find Dwight Eisenhower speaking disparagingly or in a threatening way to the Soviet people. He had a deep feeling for what they had endured during the war and for their tremendously important role in bringing the war to a successful conclusion." Susan Eisenhower said there was considerable debate in her grandfather's administration on how he should respond to Stalin's death. He stated the administration's commitment to peaceful policy in his first speech to the American people, titled "Chance for Peace." "It very clearly laid out the basic principles of the free world … and it told the Soviets what they could do to indicate that a new era had begun," she said. "The speech made it clear the United States would not attack the Soviet Union during its period of high vulnerability." Stalin with President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Teheran in 1943 Moderator Larres asked the panel if the Soviet leaders had indicated any conciliatory tone.

Eisenhower adviser Auburn Washburn said, "Not that I could find. I wasn't aware of any." Vojtech Mastny said there was no opportunity for thawing the Cold War after Stalin's death. "détente remained elusive. It never got off the ground in the aftermath of Stalin's death, because neither his successors (Georgi Malenkov or Nikita Khrushchev) really dared to want it. They were never secure enough to risk détente nor insecure enough to need it." Hope Harrison said the Soviet leaders succeeding Stalin were mindful of the West and tried to initiate moderate policies in East Germany, but ran into problems. Wishing to stem the loss of citizens to the West (447,000 people fled from 1951 to 1953), the East Germans asked shortly after Stalin died if the border could be closed in Berlin. "But Stalin's successors said ‘No, absolutely not. That would make us look terrible. Grossly simplistic, unacceptable approach,'" Harrison said.

Three months later, she said, the new Soviet leaders completed a review of Stalin's policies and handed the East Germans a document known as "New Course," which called for liberalization and reaching out to the West. "They told the East Germans they had to change their policies so people would stop fleeing. They told them to stop being so aggressive, to reach out their hand in friendship. "But it didn't work," Harrison said. "Every time the Soviets tried to change harsh policies, Soviet citizens would push for more leniency through protest and uprisings. In 1961, the Berlin Wall went up, and the Soviets gave up on moderation." The dictator at rest, lying in state in the Hall of Columns in the House of Unions in Moscow, 1953 The roundtable participants also spent time debating the cause of Stalin's death. The conclusion? He succumbed to natural causes. Sergei Khrushchev said, emphatically, "No, he was not poisoned." He argued that Stalin did not taste any food unless his closest advisers, including Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, tried the food first. Also, Stalin was tightly guarded.

"I don't see any technical possibility for murder," Khrushchev said. Stalin collapsed on March 1, 1953, and remained unconscious until he died on March 5. Khrushchev said he didn't receive immediate medical care because Stalin's advisers at first thought he was drunk and would regain consciousness. "He was on the floor and they brought him [up] on the sofa," said Khrushchev. A member of the audience, Vladimir Shamberg, described himself as a close friend of Svetlana, Stalin's daughter. "I believe I was the first person she saw after her father's death, and she never spoke about something fishy," he said. Shamberg said he believes Stalin's advisers failed to get him immediate medical care because they were afraid of the consequences, not because they wanted him dead. "They thought if he regained consciousness and saw the doctors, he would suspect a plot and have them all executed," said Shamberg, adding that Stalin eventually received treatment from a major in his guard who happened to be a veterinarian. Panel participants agreed Stalin probably was not murdered, but they did speculate over the lack of medical care. "There was a motivation to letting him die,"Garthoff said.

"Stalin was planning a major purge in which most of them [his advisers] would be swept aside." Larres pointed out that in February 1953, Stalin ordered construction of four new giant prison camps. Stalin's death brought change to the Soviet Union. "After Stalin was gone, these people were able to break out of that awful system; that's one of the thankful things," said Kramer. "The Soviet Union remained a repugnant dictatorship, but it was a very different place after Stalin was gone." Mastny said, "The death of Stalin was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union." Stalin, he explained, left an unmanageable legacy, economically and in terms of security. Billington spoke of the need of Russia and the world to face up to the horrors of the Stalin regime. "The tragedy of Stalinism was not simply a tragedy of Stalinism, but a failure of the civilized world–a moral failure of the Western world," he said. "There is no definitive document or any work on the gulag. People still don't want to think about it. They still haven't fully understood this. There is no memorial for the gulag anywhere in the world," Billington said.

There are small efforts to address the topic, some researchers doing work, but they're having a hard time getting support, he said. Soon afterwards, his reputation began to deteriorate inside and outside the Soviet Union: below left, "Epitaph" by Ross A. Lewis (Ross Aubrey) from the March 7, 1953, issue of the Milwaukee Journal; and "The Forgotten Man" by Daniel Robert Fitzpatrick, published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on May 11, 1953. Kramer said, "Russia would be a lot better off if there was a systematic effort to recount, recall and memorialize the horrors of the Stalin period." Some on the panel expressed concern that Stalin rates highly in Russian opinion polls today. Harrison attributes the popularity to the older citizens who are thankful to Stalin for getting them through World War II. Panelists expect that the atrocities of Stalin will be researched over the next 25 years. They pointed out that although Germany is a stronger country today for facing up to its crimes during the Nazi regime, it took many years for the Germans to deal with their history.

Eisenhower said, "It wasn't until recently that the Holocaust was thoroughly digested, and it's been 50 years since the end of the war. The Soviet Union is only 10 years gone." Larres concluded the discussion by briefly drawing a line to the problems of the present regime change in Iraq. He said, "While history never offers any precise lessons, the events in the Soviet Union 50 years ago may be able to give us some useful food for thought. After Stalin's death, it took democracy 40 years to put down tentative roots in Russia and Eastern Europe. It probably can't be assumed that a similar process in Iraq and the Arab world will happen within a short period of time." Donna Urschel is a freelance writer.

Question: In which year did Josef Stalin die?
Answer: 1953